The Santa Cruz County LGBTQ+ collection is comprised of approximately 1300 objects in various formats, including: photographs, newsletters, periodicals, ledgers, manuscripts, newspaper clippings, flyers, mailers, posters, cassettes, VHS tapes, and oral history recordings documenting the history of the LGBTQ Community in Santa Cruz County.
The collection started with a 2009 donation of two boxes of materials documenting LGBTQ+ activism in Santa Cruz by local resident Dan Dickmeyer. This was the spark for the LGBTQ+ Trailblazers History Project from our longtime partners at The Diversity Center, through which they amassed a larger collection of materials and donated them in 2014 for safekeeping in our archives. Since then, The Diversity Center has continued to collect historical materials and donate them to the MAH.
